Fellowship of Southern Writers

Dave Smith is a poet, novelist, critic, and past editor of The Southern Review. He is currently the Eliott Coleman Professor of Poetry at Johns Hopkins University. Smith is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship, and an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Recent works include The Wick of Memory: New and Selected Poems 1970-2000, Floating on Solitude: Three Volumes of Poetry, Fate’s Kite: Poems 1991-1995, Night Pleasures, Little Boats, Unsalvaged: Poems 1992-2004, and Hunting Men: Reflections on a Life in American Poetry.


Lee Smith has published 11 novels and three collections of short stories.  She is a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award recipient, and winner of the 1991 Fellowship of Southern Writers’ Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction.  In 1999, Smith received the Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  Her latest novels are The Last Girls, winner of the 2002 Southern Book Critics Circle Award, and On Agate Hill.




Monroe K. Spears (1916-1998) former Moody Professor of English at Rice University, was the author of many books, including The Poetry of W. H. Auden: The Disenchanted Island.  He was an internationally renowned scholar of Modernism who in addition to writing his own many essays, reviews, and books brought distinguished poetry, fiction, and criticism into print as editor of The Sewanee Review.




Elizabeth Spencer is the author of a dozen works of fiction, including The Night Travellers, The Light in the Piazza, Jack of Diamonds, and The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction. Her memoir is called Landscapes of the Heart. She was awarded the 2001 Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and is the winner of five O. Henry Awards. Spencer is a founding member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. 



William Styron (1925-2006) was awarded the American Academy’s Prix de Rome for his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness.  Other works include The Long March and Set This House on Fire.  He received the 1968 Pulitzer Prize and the Howells Medal of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters for The Confessions of Nat Turner.  His novel, Sophie’s Choice won the American Book Award and was adapted to the screen in an Academy Award-winning motion picture.




Walter Sullivan (1924-2006), past Chancellor of the Fellowship, was Professor of English Emeritus at Vanderbilt University.  His works include short fiction and the novels Sojourn of a Stranger, The Long, Long Love, and A Time to Dance.  Critical works include Death by Melancholy: Essays on Modern Southern Fiction and A Requiem for the Renascence: The State of Fiction in the Modern South.  The War the Women Lived, won the Literary Achievement Award given by the Southern Heritage Society in 1996.